----- Original Message -----
From: "Nancy Householder" <pipecreek1430 at yahoo.com>
To: "GDG" <gettysburg at arthes.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2012 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: GDG- Slavery in the South
One of the things that they liked to scare people with, is talk of black
men being equal with white women,
or marrying white women. That would be a mixing of the races!! How
terrrible!
What no one liked to mention, is the mixing of the races for century's as
white owners often took black slaves
as concubines, thereby producing slaves who were mixed, black and white.
Since the mothers were slaves,
the children were slaves, so I guess they didn't count.
Nancy Householder
Nancy, in Louisiana the system was especially nuanced, with mulattos,
quadroons, octroons etc. Freedmen could marry a slave and rent a lace in her
bed for a dollar a week, but she still belonged to the master, who could
evict the husband any time he wanted. The social pressires that could be
brought to bear in this faux free system of slavery were such that, when the
bandbox Louisiana Gaurds were formed, the power structure had no problem in
finding social inducements to pressure free blacks to enlist.
There was an annual ball in New Orleans that took place in two ball
rooms-connected by a single door. In one room, the white men and their wives
partied and in the next room, the white husbands would go over and party
with their black mistresses, some of whom were free but their children were
slaves.
It touched everything.
Regards,
Jack
The Louisiana Gaurds, despite all you hear from the SCV and their fellow
travelers, never saw combat. Until after New Orleans was captured. At which
point, they willingly entered the Union Army and saw desperate action at
Port Hudson. We went to Port Hudson a few years ago. I gotta tell you that,
standing below port Hudson, mid-calf deep in a bayou and looking up that
nearly vertical slope, I was thinking it made LRT or any other slope assault
I have seen on any field in the ACW, Prairie Grove, Fredericksburg,
Spotsylvania, et al, look like a shallow slope.